This Is Us creator on 'dangerous' season finale: 'It changes everything'

There may be devastation. There
could be a twist. There might be a heart-to-heart. There probably definitely
will be tears. Whatever the case, tonight’s episode of This Is Us will bring
the season to a close on some kind of emotional, provocative note.

Titled “Moonshadow,” the season 1
finale (9 p.m. ET/PT) of the NBC family dramedy is “a very intense hour of
television,” creator Dan Fogelman tells EW. “It lives in a space we haven’t
quite lived in before, and it’s a dangerous episode in that it makes me
uncomfortable in the way you want to be uncomfortable if you’re doing my job.
I’m excited for people to see it.”

The finale will focus primarily
on Pearson patriarch and matriarch Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy
Moore), picking up where the last episode left off, with an intoxicated Jack
getting into a car, aiming to repair his cracked marriage. It also transports
you to a much earlier time in their lives — the year 1972, before they met.
“This is the episode where you get to see Jack and Rebecca before there ever
was a Jack and Rebecca,” says Fogelman. “You see them in their much younger
years as they’re figuring out what kind of lives they want for themselves. Jack
has returned from Vietnam — he is in a bad living situation at home with his
parents — Rebecca is embarking on a music career that is not exactly breaking
her way, and they’re both trying to find their way through life. It’s the story
of how they were doing at that stuff before they had each other to lean on.”

And for those fans who
fastidiously follow the facial follicles of father Jack, this is the episode in
which you experience him sans beard, mustache, or goatee. “This was always the
plan: In the final episode of the season, we would see Jack in a younger age
than we’ve seen him before,” says Fogelman. “We knew the whole year was going
to be a story about different forms of his facial hair and that the final
episode of the season would reveal him clean-shaven for the first time… It was the
first time we’d seen him all year without anything on his face. It was such a
surprising shock, and we thought, ‘Oh, people are going to love this.’”

It sounds like he thinks the same
of a moment that will help close out the season. “There’s a scene at the end
that I’d put up there with anything we’ve done this season,” he says. “I’m
incredibly proud of Mandy and Milo as actors in the entire episode, but
particularly this scene is just stunning. It’s going to get a lot of people
talking, and it’s going to have a lot of people debating.”

“[The finale] is going to answer some
questions and make people ask some new ones, and change a lot of people’s
perceptions about where they think the show is going,” says Fogelman. “Without
giving much away, it changes everything — and maybe in ways people might be
talking about, maybe in other ways.”